We had them separated once upon a time. UX was arguably worse.

I have them separated in firefox because i find it superior.

Me too. I search through both URL bar and search bar, and sometimes I use the search bar as a scratchpad of sorts – very convenient IMO.

Agreed. When I go to modify my searches after clicking through a few pages and realizing I'm not getting what I need, I don't have to hit back n times until I get back to the search.

The alternative would be always opening search results in a new tab until I find what I'm looking for, but I don't need more tab clutter.

I have it too, but unfortunately this only gives you two search boxes, behavior of the url bar doesn't change.

I'm pretty sure that you can fully disable search in the URL bar by changing 'browser.fixup.alternate.enabled' to false

Personally I like them separate. But I’ve been working with folks who are not very computer literate at all and I think I agree with you. If one doesn’t know what a URL is in the first place, how would one distinguish which box to type in?

Having them be the same can make tech support a nightmare trying to figure out whether someone actually successfully entered a URL or if they just googled it :(

(I personally love the URL bar & search bar being the same bar)

I get the luxury of working with folks in person. In 99% of cases the search produces the right website as the first result. But yeah idk maybe AOL had something going with keywords in some sense in terms of accessibility ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's because of the omnibox that people no longer know what an URL is.

I think that’s part of it. I love URLs (and URIs). Another big part is the predominance of closed social media platforms where the concept of a URL is mostly irrelevant

You have it backwards: The omnibox (or whatever you want to call it) came about because people don't know what the hell a Universal Resource Locator is.

Most people don't know how to navigate their local file system, let alone the internet.

> Universal Resource Locator

The U stands for "uniform". Which kinda supports your point, actually.

I guess that's showing my age, URI used to stand for Universal Resource Identifier which URL derives from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#Re...

>The publication of IETF RFC 2396 in August 1998 saw the URI syntax become a separate specification and most of the parts of RFCs 1630 and 1738 relating to URIs and URLs in general were revised and expanded by the IETF. The new RFC changed the meaning of U in URI from "Universal" to "Uniform."

Yes. To dig a bit, they don't know because platform providers have pushed the net in that direction for decades.

AOL keywords were thing. Then fancy domain names that don't sound like domain names. Then search keywords. Then hashtags etc. The goal has always been to not ask the customer to think about it and just get to businesses.

The one that says "Search" in it?

You’d be surprised how many folks don’t turn up their font size when they have bad vision

You'd be surprised how hard adjusting font sizes in UI elements can be.

It should not need to be, if designed well. For example, the operating system facilities could make it that UI sizes will be specified by character size instead of by pixels, and then the operating system facilities can allow the user to adjust the UI fonts, so that any programs could use them.

I think that it does not need a separate area of the screen reserved for searching, but that there should be an explicit way to indicate that you want to search. For example, this could be a popup window. Unlike the URL, which it is useful to be displayed even if you are not entering a new URL, this is not necessary for entering search queries, so using a popup window for this purpose may be helpful.

I think it's the autocomplete in particular that leaks a lot of private data. I've rarely had the combined bar do a search when I didn't want it to.

But I use firefox and I turned off autocomplete. And I use my own search instance (SearXNG)

> I think it's the autocomplete in particular that leaks a lot of private data.

That’s the beauty. The whole unified input can be presented as a UX simplicity gain, while this quote points at the actual business value. ;)

Innovation!

IIRC there is no setting in Firefox to keep the content of the URL bar local.

How could searchengines provide suggestions without your browser sending the url-bar content?

If you want the content of your URL bar to stay local you should disable suggestions

They can do it like they previously did it: provide suggestions by sending the search box content.

How is that different in the case of a combined search&url bar?

You'll need to explicitly navigate to the input box _designated_ for using a search engine.

If I'm accidentally pasting what I thought was a URL but actually is some other text in the paste buffer in the combined input box, that text is already sent to the search engine (provided suggestions are enabled, which they are by default).

If I do the same in the split URL/search box situation, and paste it in the URL box, it would at most look into the browser's history, keeping the input local.

I had managed to make a old version of Firefox to treat URLs entered in the location bar as relative. In my opinion, this is the reasonable way to work. The computer doesn't have to guess what you mean, and does not have to guess if the TLD is valid. It will do what you typed into the computer; and if it is an error, will display the error message.

For searching, I had done that if you put a colon at first and then the name of the search engine, then it will search.

No, everyone loves it. By everyone I mean the vast majority of the world.

The fact of the matter is most people do not grok addresses, so a dedicated address bar is useless to them. It's bad user interface design that defies what most people can do.

Here's how most people actually use a web browser if they want to go somewhere, say Amazon:

1. Type "amazon".

2. Enter.

3. First result is (probably) amazon.com.

4. Click.

5. ????

6. PROFIT!

In the dark ages this was facilitated by setting the home page to a search engine like Google, changing the address bar to a search bar removes that additional step making it that much easier for the common man.

Is it horrible for security and privacy? Yeah. But you write a web browser for users, not security and privacy nazis.

> nazis

Could we please not use such a term for privacy/security conscious people? Maybe it’s because I am German but I feel very uncomfortable being called such.

Au contraire, we should mock the word "nazi" relentlessly so youngsters won't think it's a cool subculture in their quest to create their identity as they grow up.

And yes, I am mocking a certain subset of security/privacy advocates because they are quite detached from the wider world at large.

It does break user expectation.

1. Type "mycompany-internal-gitlab".

2. Enter.

3. The expected thing should happen.